Every publishing project, especially news, features, reviews, surveys and editorials, involves sharing information, whether it's in words, pictures, graphs or charts. Your job is to gather and organize that information in a way that makes sense to our readers.
Where to Look | Take Notes | Cite Your Sources | Save Your Work | Finish Your Project

Where to Look

If you need help finding accurate information for news reports or other stories, try the following sources:

• Look at our school web site for information about school events, projects, policies, staff, etc.
• Use Edison's search and research page to gather other information from the web, or any of Edison's links pages to look for information by subject
• Find links to online news magazines, sites and newspapers.
• Look things up in the library, read the local papers, ask adults you trust, listen to the radio!
• Interview someone who has knowledge or experience related to your topic.
• Do a survey
• Take photographs

Only use information you can trust. If you're not sure about a source (person, web site, book, etc.), ask your advisor!

Take Notes

You'll need to take notes when gathering information. You can:

• Write or draw your notes with paper and pencil. Your notes can be any combination of sentences, words, phrases, charts, diagrams or drawings, as long as it helps you remember what you need to know in an accurate way.
• Record notes with a digital recorder - this is especially helpful for an interview so you can accurately quote something your interviewee has said.
• Type notes in a word processor, such as iWork Pages, or an outliner like Inspiration. The advantage of an outlining / diagramming tool like Inspiration is that later, you can organize your notes for writing.
• Take a photo of the information you need or of something you don't want to forget (I do this a lot to keep track of something I've written on the whiteboard).
• Print a web page - only if necessary! Printing a page can help if you don't have time to finish your research on the web. However, if you're not careful, you might print many more pages than you need, which wastes precious resources! It's also better to put your notes into your own words.
• Printing tip: when you print, use the "Preview" button to see how many pages there are, then use print range ('from page to page ') to only print the pages you need.

Cite Your Sources

Copy down the source of your information, including the URL (web address) if it's from the web, or the title, author and publisher if it's a book. OSLIS has great advice on citing sources.

• Google is not a source for images or information! If you use an image from a Google search, you need to note down where the image came from originally. For our balloon example (right), you'd paste "Image from clusterballoon.org" in small print below the image.

Save Your Work

Save your work at each step. Give your documents clear, short names. Save them either to your USB jump drive or to your personal folder. Do not save your work to the computer's desktop or documents folder, or they might not be there next time you come back!

Finish Your Project

After gathering notes, it's time to organize them for writing and illustrating. If you're not sure what kind of project you'd like to do with the information you have, look at our planning pages for ideas. From there, you will edit and then add your project to our layout.